Wednesday, July 13, 2016

THE PLAYER - #812

My thing about
movies that are about movies is that the good ones make me want to watch other
movies. If I watch The Bad and the Beautiful, for instance,
I’m going to want to chase it with Cat People. Who didn’t
watch the opening of The Player back when it was released in
1992 and not immediately go view--or even re-view--Touch ofEvil? Or how about pairing it up with Bicycle
Thieves [review]? Better yet, another movie about movies, based on a
book about movies, Elia Kazan’s vastly underrated adaptation of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Monroe Stahr, the movie mogul
in The Last Tycoon, was modeled after Irving Thalberg, whom
surely director Robert Altman and writer Michael Tolkin had in mind when they
created Griffin Mill, their motion picture wunderkind, as played by Tim Robbins.

And it’s not just
that The Player is about movies, it’s utterly in love with
them. You get that right from the virtuoso opening shot, which runs without
cutting for 8 1/2 minutes (certainly no coincidence), referencing not just
Touch of Evil, but The Sheltering Sky and
Rope and a couple of other films that pulled off similar
feats (this was pre-Tarantino, mind you). There are easter eggs throughout this
thing, and not just the cameos by then au currant celebs,
but jokes and winks and the careful placement of other films and filmmakers to
cue the audience to what is coming next. Be it Griffin walking under a movie
marquee as the lights go out on The Bicycle Thief to signal
his own oncoming moral dilemma, or the fake-out of Lyle Lovett walking by a
Hitchcock photo as an indicator of suspense and a deep visual pun about “the
wrong man.” The murder victim declares, “See you in the next reel,
pal,” ironic last words befitting the noir plot Griffin Mill will
find himself in, as predicted by the posters in his office.

If you’re a cinephile,
you’re going to eat this stuff up.

If you’re not, if
you’re just a casual movie fan, then no worries, you’re going to dig
The Player, too. It’s more than a collection of in jokes and
elbowing Hollywood in the ribs. Altman and Tolkin bring an honest-to-goodness
murder plot along with all the references. The Player is a
movie that aims to be as good as all the other movies it emulates.

In terms of story,
it’s simple. Griffin Mill is a hotshot Hollywood producer who appears to be
going cold. In the midst of his concerns that his boss is bringing in his
replacement (Peter Gallagher), he’s also getting harassing post cards from an
anonymous writer that he never called back. When the threats turn scary,
Griffin tries to figure out who it is, settling on one writer in particular,
David Kahane (played by a young, nearly unrecognizable Vincent D’Onofrio).
Griffin tracks Kahane to a revival screening of the Neorealist classic
The Bicycle Thief (or Bicycle Thieves)
and tries to reason with him. Only, Kahane isn’t the guy--even if he hates
Griffin all the same. Accusations cause tempers to flare and a scuffle ensues,
leading to the writer ending up dead and Griffin trying to make it look like a
robbery.

And he’s successful
for the most part. The only problem is, someone saw the two of them together,
and the cops (Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett) think it’s suspicious that the
movie exec was somehow randomly the last person to see a no-name scribe alive.
This line of thinking is only heightened when Griffin starts dating the
deceased’s girlfriend (Greta Scacchi). In any conventional script, Griffin
would certainly look guilty.

Which, of course,
we know he is, but that’s immaterial. The question that lingers, what will he
do to get out of it? That’s what any good suspense movie is about. Plus, we
know that the real stalker is still out there, and he could strike at any
minute. Somehow these things have to converge, right? That’s what the rules of
screenwriting have taught us. Not to mention that the fake moviemakers in the
movie we are watching keep harping on the need for a happy ending. Griffin Mill
has to find his way out of it, or The Player will fail.

That might actually
be The Player’s most ingenious bit, how Tolkin builds in all
this conventional wisdom about what makes a successful movie--twists, turns,
sex, surprising rescues, happy endings--and then delivers on each. It’s the
artiest of blockbusters, The Player is. Like if the Kaufman
Brothers in Adaptation cracked the code and managed to
sincerely make it work. (Which, let’s be honest, it works in
Adaptation; as soon as Donald takes over, the film becomes a
crowdpleaser.)

Tim Robbins brings
an interesting energy to his performance. He is both slimy and trustworthy, at
times believably dim and yet otherwise extremely cagey. It’s excellent casting,
how we feel about Griffin is probably how a lot of people feel about Robbins,
who himself can be seen as a little pretentious and also a bit of a windbag due
to his openness about his politics. Yet, he also always seems like a decent
guy, he’d probably be pretty nice in person. We like him, but we want to hate
him, too.

Fans of Hollywood
lore will see other nods to history in The Player, perhaps
most deftly in Fred Ward’s fixer character, which resembles MGM’s Eddie Mannix,
immortalized in both the films Hollywoodland and more recently
Hail, Caesar! There is also some amusing commentary about
television actors wanting to be in movies, which seems only ironic and outdated
given how so much and so many have shifted from the big screen to cable
television for better opportunities in recent years. Tim Robbins himself was
last seen on HBO in a bad Dr. Strangeloverip-off.

Television may be
the current perceived assassin of big studio pictures, but moviemakers have had
many threats before this one--including TV, which was originally supposed to be
the death knell of the moviegoing experience back in the 1950s. Most would say
the changing of the guard in the 1960s was the true end of Golden Age
Hollywood--which is largely what Altman is paying tribute to here. His movie
studio resembles the classic system as much as it does the bloated 1980s
version he’s critiquing. The Player actually came at a time
when independent films were having their heyday, and the Sundance crowd was
moving in. I guess these things are cyclical. If the auteurs of the 1960s and
1970s gave birth to the blockbuster, then the indie scene of the 1990s gave us
the mega blockbuster. Would there even be a Griffin Mill now, or would he just
be a collection of stockholders?

I guess it doesn’t
really matter. All we can say for sure is that he’d still be getting away with
it. Now more than ever.

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About Me

Author of prose novels and comic books like Cut My Hair, It Girl & the Atomics, You Have Killed Me, and 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. Jamie's most recent novel is the serialized book Bobby Pins and Mary Janes, and his most recent graphic novels are the sci-fi romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Madame Frankenstein with Megan Levens; and the weird crime comic Archer Coe & the Thousand Natural Shocks with Dan Christensen. He also co-created Lady Killer with Joëlle Jones.